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I normally see the Bridging the Gap short films at the Edinburgh Film Festival, so it was a little odd to see them in Inverness. This year’s theme was ‘rebellion’ apparently, which I’m not actually that sold on as a theme for the films. Looking at the piece I wrote last time I saw a full ‘Bridging the Gap’ screening, it appears that they normally assign the theme first – as the scheme provides new Scottish/based-in-Scotland film-makers with not only funding, but training and support as well – and on that basis I’m not sure that they fulfilled the brief very well. There are some quite nice little documentaries in the selection but none that really blew me away. There’s certainly nothing to compare to Pouters and Polaris from that last time. (Oddly enough I’ve since seen Polaris again since then twice at other short film screenings and I’m never disappointed to re-watch it.)

Teeth
Far and away the funniest film of the screening. Oddly enough it’s a kind of documentary that I usually hate, in which the director is making a film about some issue or other that they are a little obsessed about and talking to us via the voiceover. They’re usually either terribly worthy or terribly cringey. However, thankfully this one was an exception. I loved the conceit of filming the interview subjects’ mouths so that we focus on their teeth. Perhaps because I have had a difficult relationship with my own teeth and the dentistry industry. (My teeth were fine until I got my first wisdom tooth at fifteen, and it was all downhill from there.) Maybe because it didn’t take its subject matter too seriously and was genuinely funny in its tone. I’ve felt his pain, and so, wincing in sympathy, I laughed with him.

Inhale
This was the best film of the bunch I think. Apart from some weird arty shots of tadpoles and frogspawn at the start, it was a beautifully shot and perfectly pitched in tone film. It’s about grief and recovery and resilience. It helps that its central character has one of those really compelling voices; he’s lived an interesting life and can express himself well when he’s talking about it. One of those people that if you ended up talking to him on a train, you’d gladly go an extra couple of stops to keep talking to. It’s a subtle and very moving film, highly recommended.

We Are Here
An odd but charming film. It’s a film about friendship and about reconnecting with your best friend as an adult. In this case because the director’s best friend, Stuart, had an accident a couple of years ago and is recovering from a traumatic brain injury. It’s about memory and identity and living in the moment. This fascinating central concept that they agree on that this person is not who he was before the accident, that he’d never be that person again and that that’s fine. That they can still be best friends not just despite that, but also partially because of it.

There’s something missing from this film that I can’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps its just a feeling that there’s a question the director isn’t asking, that he would be asking if his subject wasn’t his childhood best friend. Regardless of this, I liked the film.

Plastic Man
This is a beautifully shot film and its central character is both odd and compelling – I can completely understand why someone would want to make a film about him. However, I came away from the film unsure about what it is he’s actually doing or for that matter what the film is trying to say about it.

HoldHold is an odd film. It’s about absence and loving someone who isn’t there. In this case because they’re in prison. From what little we learn its presumably white-collar crime – theft, a nine-year sentence, they’re very middle-class – and there’s a kind of naiveté about the whole thing. It’s weird that the little girl in the film seems more practical and accepting of reality – this is how our lives are now – than her mother. Her mother is the one who has, by her own admission, built a fantasy/fiction around the whole situation.

Only My Voice
This is a film about refugee women in Greece. Some of them we never see and the ones we do, we only see in fragments, as though to actively prevent us from drawing conclusions about them and their lives from their faces. This film also has some glorious sound design moments, taking the woman’s voices and playing with them and their context. It’s an interesting concept and is probably the film that best adheres to the theme of rebellion. Almost all the women talk about the way that coming to Greece has both extended and limited their freedom.

The advantage of a small concentrated film festival like Inverness is that you can get a lot seen in the course of four really intense days. The disadvantage is that if you happen to be away for the weekend of the week that it’s on you’ll miss a sizeable percentage of the films. Which is to say that I missed several really interesting looking documentaries due to being in Aberdeen, though my bank balance probably appreciates it. (Hence my lack of nablopomo posting over the weekend, as I was away without the laptop. I did, however, manage to knock out a draft of a short story for a competition I want to enter, which I feel should count for something. The friend I was staying with was fair taken with me actually writing in a paper notebook.) I did manage to see some things, so really there’s no reason to sulk about the things I didn’t see.

Very Semi-Serious

After my earlier fretting about the unlikeness of my chances of getting to my target of 25 feature documentaries this year, I came across my list of new years resolutions and lo and behold my actual target is the much more achievable 15 documentaries. As this film is number 11 for this year, I actually feel hopeful rather than daunted by the task ahead.

Very Semi Serious is a film about the Cartoon department of the New Yorker. It’s a charming little film about the serious business of being funny. More an insight into how being a cartoonist in the 21st century works, and how the publishing industry has changed since the ‘golden era’, than an actual history of the New Yorker. It’s the kind of film I feel ought to make the rounds of art schools for budding cartoonists to watch and get a realistic idea of how hard they’ll have to work to get on in the industry. Interesting and charming and amusing, even if in my case it was more of a wry smile than a guffaw, but then that tends to be my reaction to the cartoons themselves so it seems entirely fitting.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film was that it tackled head on the issue of diversity amongst the cartoonists. It looks at the activities of the current Cartoon Editor to shake submissions up, to find and nurture new talent because in his words

“Unless we interceded this may be the last generation of cartoonists to do this.”

That utterly pragmatic statement as a reason for opening up the submissions process, seems to fit perfectly with what they say they want from their cartoonists. Which is essentially to find cartoonist with distinctive styles and voices. It’s interesting to watch the archive footage of a gathering of the cartoonists in the 70s – essentially a gathering of late middle-aged white guys, with one solitary woman slipping awkwardly through the crowd – and compare it to the current crop with its considerably more diverse mix.

We do get the usual suspects interviews – the legends of the job if you will – but instead of just getting our one trailblazing female cartoonist – Roz Chast – talking about how it used to be and one of the current ones talking about how it is now, several female cartoonists, at different stages in their career with the magazine are interviewed about different things. In fact the interviews with the current batch of cartoonists are pretty much gender balanced. I feel odd bringing it up, but it says something about the documentaries that I’ve watched recently that I felt that there were a lot of women in this documentary when really it was just a proportional number in terms of how many were part of the story. (According to the Variety review there were 45 named contributors of those 15 are women. I’m remembering that Geena Davis article from years back about the 3:1 ratio of men to women in family films and how that affects the point at which we ‘see’ the balance tip on representation by gender and laughing at myself for proving her point.)

It’s a film largely dominated by the presence of Bob Mankoff – rightly so, he’s an interesting guy with lots of intelligent and interesting things to say about the serious art of being funny – about a very white, male middle class institution, I would not have been surprised, and probably wouldn’t have noticed if Chast had been our only female contributor. It was nice to have variety – a range of cartoonists, a production staffer, Mankoff’s wife and daughter – but kind of sad that it’s unusual enough to be noticeable.

Carnival of Souls

This was a really unusual film event to attend, as there wasn’t actually a film being projected.

It’s a binaural sound experience! Basically they took the script of a 1962 horror movie of the same name and adapted it as an audio drama. Binaural audio, for the uninitiated is essentially where sound is recorded using a set up where the microphones are positioned like your ears (usually using an adapted mannequin head, but you can do it yourself with microphones that sit in your ears like headphones) while the drama unfolds around them. Done well it produces a really immersive experience. In the cinema we wore wireless headphones and blindfolds and dived in. The blurb made a great deal about having tested the drama out on blind film fans to let them tweak it to be more effective. And the soundscape is really effective. Creepy and strange and really evocative. Technically its brilliant, I’m in awe. It’s a shame therefore that the plot of the film itself – especially the ending – makes no sense. Early on it works wonderfully but towards the end of the film it just, doesn’t make sense. Presumably something on screen in the film itself would have made a big reveal but perhaps not. It was really clever and really well done, but I do wish they’d chosen better source material.

As an aside, I think the technique has potential as an interesting way to re-score silent movies. I think it could be really fun to take the script of a silent movie – just because we can’t hear the dialogue, doesn’t mean it wasn’t written – and do the same thing with that and screen the two in sync. Now that would be a 3D cinema experience I could get behind.

Handily for my Nablopomo aspirations, this month does appear to be filled with interesting events for me to write about. Which does make me wonder, is autumn a particularly good season for the arts in Inverness or have I missed all sorts of gems other months because I wasn’t hunting for blog material? Clearly I need to be paying more attention…

It’s the Inverness Film Festival this week! No, until a month ago, I didn’t know they had one either but they do and this year is in fact the 13th Inverness Film Festival. The theme this year is those “who are brave enough to move away from their comfort zones and embark on an adventure, whether that be by choice or circumstance.” Given that moving to Inverness in the first place was about leaving my comfort zone and seeking adventure, it feels particularly fitting to me that this one should be the first I got to attend.

Early mornings at film festivals are usually the territory of short films, and the IFF is no exception. Short films from the UK, short films from around the world, short films for kids of different ages and, most relevant to my interests, short documentaries.

Half the films in the selection were products of the Scottish Documentary Institutes’ Bridging the Gap initiative and the correlation between those and my favourites in the screening was pretty close. They were all really interesting and different documentaries, which is something I associate with – and value in – the output of the SDI. Embarrassingly I was late and missed the first film in the screening, so I’ll stick to talking about my favourites of the films I did see rather than reviewing them all.

Mining Poems or Odes

This was the film that least caught my fancy in the program but which utterly captured my imagination and heart in the screening. The central concept of the film a poet and ex-Shipyard welder, Robert, talks about how being a welder shaped his writing, his worldview and his relationship with words and philosophy. The film is poetic and mesmerising, and Robert’s words and screen presence are compelling – that face, that voice, those words – I could have listened to him for hours. His descriptions are economic but paint vivid pictures of a world lost and an education at the hands of a type of men that seem to have vanished with it. Big burly men, of few words, who taught him to weld and badgered him into reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Das Kapital, who swung great big hammers for fun but could put more care into asking ‘alright son?’ than other people put into saying ‘I love you’. For all that the film is presented in quite a stylistic fashion, it feels more honest and authentic to its subject than many a more earnest documentary.

Is a charming wee film about the Banana Flats – officially Cables Wynd estate – in Leith. It follows a photographer who grew up in the flats, as he works on a photography project, documenting the people who live in the flats now. It’s a film about community and what home means to different people. (Also the idiosyncrasies of flat numbering, I spent enough of my childhood traipsing up and down blocks of council flats leafleting with my dad to truly appreciate the frustration and triumph of their search for flat 69!) It’s a slight film, without any great pretensions of grand messages, just a slice of life – lives that those who don’t live them seldom see. Which to me, is the core of what documentary, especially in short form, should be about.

United We Will Swim…Again

This was probably the film in the selection that I was most interested to see. It follows the long-running campaign to save the Calder Street baths in Glasgow. The longest film in the selection at 26 minutes, it nonetheless felt about half its length, packing in 100 years of history and 13 years of activism. For the uninitiated, back in 2001 Glasgow City Council decided to close the public baths in Govanhill. They were a popular and well-used public service, the focal point for a lot of community activity both water based and not, and in the wake of the closure of many local amenities it became the line in the sand that the community rallied round and said no more closures. In many ways it’s a heart-warming tale of a diverse community (traditionally it has been a working class and immigrant community, one of the interviewees claims it as one of the most diverse communities outside of London) coming together to protest and campaign. Of a community buy out of a local amenity to return it to its proper role as a central community hub. Of their on-going campaign to be able to afford to use them as an actual swimming pool again. But it’s also a story of institutional greed and power corrupting officials. The aerial footage of the mounted police officers advancing on protesters sitting in the street, tells its own story. Over and over during the film, especially during the section about the removal of the protesters occupying the baths, I wondered why? What made the council so fixated on closing the Govanhill Baths? In the face of the campaigning and protesting, why were they so set on closing an amenity so well-loved by its community that they would organise sit-ins and marches, would practically riot in the streets to keep it? What did they even use the money they got for selling it for? Because it certainly wasn’t improving the substandard housing that makes a Victorian bathhouse remain necessary for its original purpose in the 21st century. There’s scope for a longer and more in depth film about the wider issues, because you can’t help but wonder how many other communities – especially in these less economically sunny times – have lost their vital amenities in quieter and less well-known battles.

It’s a long way to go for a swim, but if they do get the pools open again, I think I’ll be making the effort nonetheless.

I started this year with such good intentions about my documentary watching. After the success of last year’s documentary a month project, I was excited to up my game and try to watch 25 feature documentaries. I got a good start to the year at the Glasgow Film Festival, but then, well life got interesting and documentary watching fell by the wayside. I managed to catch a few documentaries on the iPlayer from the Storyville strand but at the end of September I had only watched 6 feature length documentaries. I needed to up my game.

Thankfully, my local arts cinema (Eden Court) was having a good month for documentaries so I was able to arrange a triple bill of documentaries across October. (I actually ended up watching four documentaries if we count Häxan from my last post, which I do.) If I were only aiming for twelve documentaries again this year I’d be feeling quite positive about the challenge – I was actually at the same stage in October last year before I had my epic four documentaries in two days session – but as it is I’m searching for ways to keep the momentum going.

Salt for Svanetia

Its essentially a 1930s Soviet propaganda film about the state building a road that will connect Svanetia with the rest of the U.S.S.R.. (The Svan are an ethnic minority in the mountains of the Georgian caucuses.) However, other than the last ten minutes or so, you’d never know. The rest of the film feels like one of those odd silent ethnographic documentaries of that period that leave the modern viewer uncertain how much of what they’re seeing is actually an insight into a now lost way of life and how much was made up for the cameras at the time. It’s fascinating in a rather surreal way. The director apparently set out to make a fictional film set in Svanetia but could only get funded to make a documentary/propaganda film, which explains the rather jarring change of tone and tacked on feeling of the ending.

What really made this film for me was the live musical accompaniment. The Bo’ness Hippodrome’s Silent Film Festival commissioned the band Moishe’s Bagel (jazz influenced Eastern European and klezmer music…) to write a new score for it and for my money it succeeded admirably. The music was gorgeous and complimented the images and events perfectly. It did a good job of making some of the more sensational sections more human and real, making the Svan people more sympathetic than pitiable.

Palio

I think that objectively, this was probably the best of the documentaries I saw this month. Oddly enough it’s a sports documentary about, of all things, a horse race held twice every summer in a small Italian city for hundreds of years. One of the oldest sports events in the world and the only horse race where a horse can win even if it lost its rider. (It’s a bareback race and my goodness those horses don’t half lose their riders in style.) I knew nothing about the race, about the wider sport of horse racing – everything I do know I learned from reading National Velvet as a teenager – and, having bought the tickets at the start of the month, by the time the screening came around I had completely forgotten what the film was even about. Yet, somehow, the film is utterly compelling. The Palio is a horse race that’s largely not actually about the horses. Each rider taking part in the race represents an area of the city (traditionally the jockeys would be from that area but this is no longer the case and the area compete for the best jockeys – the horses are chosen in a lottery) and the wealthier the area the more money they have to spend on getting the best jockey to ride for them. While for most of the population the race is about history, civic pride, a place to play out centuries long local rivalries and a metaphor for life in the city, for the movers and shakers, the powerful and the jockeys, it is game of strategy, skill and corruption. Ever was it thus. In recent years, though, it has recently become much more about the latter element, with average rather than exceptional horses being selected again and again and one jockey coming to almost complete dominance in the race. But all that might change in the face of a young Sardinian jockey ready to challenge his former mentor. Will he take the advise of another legendary jockey and pursue the best horse rather than going for the contrade with the most money for bribes for his fellow ‘assassins’?

There’s a lot of Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack, which does wonderful things for maintaining the atmosphere and plays nicely into the thematics with the young underdog preparing to face off against his former mentor turned competitor. A compelling and almost gladiatorial show down.

The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead

Music documentaries are always a bit of a weird trip for me. Largely because I’m not usually a big fan of the band in question. (I do wonder what these films are like for fans of the band, who aren’t only there for the music and the fallouts. I suspect music documentaries are my reality TV, all vicarious voyeuristic pleasure.) The Damned were no exception. I’ve always been a bit confused by them, they always turn up on punk compilation albums but my mental image of them is more New Romantic than Punk (Dave Vanian and this vampire aesthetic have a lot to answer for). They were the first punk band in the UK to get a single and an album out, but they’ve been pretty much entirely eclipsed but the rest of the movement. The Damned are…essentially more of an argument than a band and pretty much always have been. Watching the film you do wonder how they ever managed to get albums written let alone stayed together long enough for one tour let alone to still be touring. Mostly it occurs that their greatest claim to fame ought to be that they all survived!

The best review I can really make of the film is that, I came away from the film not really liking any of them as human beings, but thinking that if they did happen to tour near me anytime soon, I’d likely make the effort to go see them. Make of that what you will.

It’s Hallowe’en which here means my local arts cinema put on a marathon selection of horror movies for young and old. It was organised by the local film society and they really went to town on the decorations and associated activities. There were six films on all together, though I only went to see the latter three. I mistakenly thought it was all kids films in the first half when actually most of them were just PG rated due to being old (Bride of Frankenstein and The Mummy) which I was disappointed to miss. I went along intending to see A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (I tried to see it at the Glasgow Film Festival, but the timings didn’t work) and Häxan but it turned out that the special ticket they were doing meant I could see Rosemary’s Baby for free. (Which nicely circumvented my desire to not give Roman Polanski money.) It was a thoroughly entertaining evening all round and definitely one of the better – and cosier – ways to spend Hallowe’en.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

First up it’s an Iranian Vampire film. Which, lets be honest, is a description that will either make your ears prick up with interest or decide to run away right now. And that’s probably for the best, because if it’s your kind of film then you’ll really enjoy it, but if its not you’re going to be really confused. Because the other thing that it is, is heavily influenced – in terms of style, imagery, set design and music – by Spaghetti Westerns. The film is set in a mysterious ghost town of a city called Bad Town. It feels very much like a Western, but in that way that watching Seven Samurai feels like watching a Western, it’s a Western filtered through Iranian culture.

Our nominal hero Arash, looks like James Dean and drives a beautiful classic American car that is his prize possession. He fights against circumstances and somehow gets out alive. The girl (she is the vampire with no name) on the other hand looks like she stepped out of a Nouvelle Vague film, dancing to records in her room like a 60s Parisian teenager. It’s fascinating the way her Chador gives her freedom, makes her untouchable yet alluring. (Somehow the skateboard only adds to the effect, making her seem childlike and implacably ancient all at once.) There’s an innocence to their chaste courtship that feels like it stepped out of another era, and they both move through the strange world of the film like aliens, never quite blending in, using that to their advantage. They both have a strong sense of justice and fairness that does not necessarily line up with legalities of their time and place. Kindred spirits despite their almost insurmountable differences.

The film has a dreamlike quality, compelling and strange and wonderful. I haven’t seen anything quite like it. See it if you can.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

Officially, it’s a fictionalised documentary. Which was fairly standard for documentaries of the time. It was filmed in Denmark and funded by Swedish backers. It looks at the history of magic and witchcraft from pagan times up to the then present (1921). Amusingly, the director, Benjamin Christensen, intended to make the film much more fully researched with historical advisors, but it turned out that most of the experts on the subject he wanted to consult were opposed to the film being made.

Unofficially, it’s just really strange. (Apparently there’s a version available with a narration by William S. Burroughs, having seen the film that honestly doesn’t surprise me and I’m not entirely sure that that would make it any weirder.) It’s an interesting and entertaining experience but it’s certainly not a documentary that you would recommend to anyone wanting to seriously learn about the subject.

The thing I most enjoyed about Haxan, honestly, was the accompaniment. The two guys providing the accompaniment had gone the full hog in terms of ‘authentic’ accompaniment, by using a whole host of instruments to create the score and do all the sound effects. Often to great comic effect. Their efforts really brought the film to life and mitigated what might otherwise have been a just plain bizarre viewing experience.

Rosemary’s Baby

Classic old school psychological horror. It’s one of those classic horror movies from the 60s that makes people say ‘they don’t make them like the used to’ and well, honestly having grown up when J-Horror was breaking upon English speaking audience the response is generally ‘no they don’t, they’re scarier now.’ Personally when I say I like my horror movies old school I mean, monster movies from Universal in the 1930s or Hammer in the 60s and 70s. But I digress. I don’t actually think that Rosemary’s Baby is supposed to be conventionally scary, its more about the creeping sense of unease and dread, as events unfold and we struggle to decide whether to believe the ‘innocent’ explanation for what the neighbours are up to or whether the not so innocent but highly unlikely one is actually the truth.

Spoilers ahoy. I was actually surprised when they turned out to really be devil worshippers. I was fairly certain there was something terrible going on, but I thought devil worship was just Rosemary’s fevered imagination and the real threat would be something more mundanely evil. (I never thought it was all in her mind, not after the party and Guy’s blatant gas-lighting of her. Certainly not after Hutch’s visit. Cutting her off from her friends, controlling whom she sees and what she eats and drinks, actively preventing her from going to a different Doctor? All classic abusive behaviours.) Admittedly, the coven is in fact, terribly mundane in their evilness. With their society manners, refinement and busybodyness, they’re a sort of chintzy evil. There’s something terribly surreal about them all in their posh clothes with their china teacups crying out ‘hail Satan’. Honestly I was a bit disappointed she didn’t get to go after anyone with that knife of hers, but mostly I just spent the last 15 minutes of the film internally shouting ‘run away! Run away!’ at Rosemary.